They
f--- you up your mom and dad;
They
may not mean to but they do.
Philip
Larkin
I will tell
you up front the review I am about to write is not the one I planned to. When I
finished reading Making Pretty, I was planning to write a review about a
dark insight into a family so dysfunctional that you truly wonder how anybody
in their circle will make it out intact, and gives you little hope the narrator
will. It would have been a challenging review, but I like challenging myself
and I particularly like the idea of writing myself out of corners. Now, however,
having some time to think about it, I realize that there are at least two
interpretations of the story in this novel, neither mutually exclusive, and both
subject to the interpretation of the reader.
Looked at
one way, Making Pretty is the story of Arizona Warren, the daughter of a
plastic surgeon whose love life is so messy and dysfunctional, it has warped any
hope his children have of any kind of normal relationship, that the affair she
has with a fellow student over one summer shows just how utterly damaged she is
by living with her father as to what love looks like, that this is being done
in parallel to her father’s latest affair, engagement and marriage, and that it
ends with her and her sister running away but with no hope that answers are at
the end or at all.
Looked at
another way, Making Pretty is the story of one of the most ridiculously
dysfunctional families you’ll ever meet, who have gotten to the point where the
sisters make bets about how long their father latest marriage will last and what
stuff the wife will leave behind when her father inevitably gets tired of her,
that the romance Arizona has seems so utterly serious and end-all as much as
that’s how so many relationships seem to teenagers everywhere, and that the end
journey is basically one where maybe she has learned something at the end of
this. We all know the phrase about history repeating, first as tragedy, then as
farce, and at this point, Sean Varren’s relationships have repeated so many
times that they’ve gone well past farce and into flat-out parody. At one point near the end, Arizona comments
that her father must have his divorce attorney on speed-dial and by this point
in the book, we can imagine said attorney picking up the phone begging his client to consider
celibacy for a while.
Either
version makes it very clear that Sean Varren is absolutely unqualified to be a
father of any sort. Sean is a New York plastic surgeon, who is taken the phrase
that so many say: “Tell me what you don’t like about yourself” and by now
altered it too: “Let me tell you what I don’t like about
yourself.” Arizona mentions that her
father is endlessly doodling on pictures of women, looking for ways he can
improve them. “I can’t turn it off,” he says with a shrug. We don’t know if his wives have met him because
of who he is or because they want some kind of procedures, but Arizona is very
clear that all of the women in his life have had them at some point. She judges
them by saying that even after they end, they never have any of their work
undone.
The warning
lights are flashing by the time we learn this, but in the middle of the book
Arizona’s sister Montana reveals a secret about her father so appalling that it
sickens her sister to the point that she wishes she never learned it. (You’ll
wish you hadn’t either, but I won’t tell you.) The thing is, this shouldn’t
come as a shock to the reader when we learn it and not to Arizona. Nearly a
hundred pages earlier, she reveals that for her thirteenth birthday her father
and his newest wife Natasha gave her a gift certificate for any procedure she
wanted done to herself when she turned eighteen. Arizona doesn’t know what she finds most
horrible: that her father actually gave her this gift or that he couldn’t
understand why she was so upset when she burst into tears afterwards. When she meets her older sister Montana, who
has just come back for her freshman year at college, she is appalled by many
things, not the least of which is her sister has cashed that gift certificate
in. You get the feeling that for Montana,
this was a cry for her father to finally pay attention to her, even though by
now she knows it will never work.
Arizona is
very clearly warped so badly by her father’s lifestyle that she has no true
idea of what love is or what any of the women in her father’s life truly meant
to her. By this point, with the exception
of Natasha, one of the more recent ones, she has cut all of them out of her
life. Even then, she doesn’t seem to be able to accept Natasha’s love in any
real fashion: Natasha has by now had other children, but Arizona always leaves
before she has any chance to interact with them.
Arizona and
Montana’s mother was Sean’s first wife, and the only one who left him instead
of the other way around. From the one flashback involving her, its pretty clear
she’s the only one who realized the kind of person Sean was, and got as far
away from him as quickly as she could. In retrospect, her biggest mistake was
not taking her daughters with her. They have spent their entire lives in their
father’s orbit, and can’t even be bothered to be nice to the women when he
decides to leave them. When Tess, the most recent wife asks if they saw it
coming, they tell her they pretty much damaged. It is a testament to how
damaged Arizona is that later in the novel she comes to visit Tess, and
genuinely seems surprised that she isn’t happy to see her at all.
The story is
told entirely from the perspective of Arizona, and how she is trying her
hardest to adapt since Montana went off to college. At the start of the novel,
that means she has become ‘best friends’ with Karissa, an actress-model who the
reader can instantly tell is the worst kind of person for any teenage girl to
be around. She talks in the kind of deep sounding college speak that older get
past quickly but Arizona thinks is deep.
They constantly go drinking together, doing drugs, and dying their hair.
Arizona worships Karissa, which is why
she’s appalled when early in the novel, Sean tells him that he wants to marry
her – and worse, Karissa, immediately accepts the proposal.
It becomes
very clear that so much of Arizona’s emotions from this point on are purely
territorial. She could deal with her father’s next hopeless marriage (you get the
feeling she was just waiting for the next one to come around) and she would be
fine if Karissa were getting engaged to a man, even if it was someone much
older. She evens admit as much: “I want them both: Karissa and my father. Just
not together.” Indeed, while Montana is understandably outraged at everything
that Sean is doing, Arizona is pissed because her father is marrying Karissa –
and she wants Karissa as her friend, but not her most recent stepmother. She spends most of the novel trying to do
everything they did before, getting drunk together, partying wildly, even
staying out all night together. It is
not until Karissa makes a reveal that finally tells her that there has never
been a single true thing about her that she gets to the point where she actually
hates her – and in a funny way, makes her perfect for Sean.
To be clear,
Sean doesn’t think for a moment anything he is doing is wrong or even takes his
daughter feelings into account one bit. He has long since passed the ability to
feel anything real for anyone, probably not even for himself, certainly not his
daughter. When Arizona tells him the secret that Karissa has been keep, he
momentarily acts protective of her, but the conversation that follows barely
meets the standard of typical human interaction. Given the scope of the secret,
you get the feeling he'd be angrier if she had lied about her natural hair
color. He tries to say something comforting that he says her mother told her,
but can’t even remember the words. And even though the secret that Karissa told
calls everything we know about her into question, he marries her a few days
later anyway. (Arizona wonders if he said the vows with his fingers crossed.)
What Arizona
doesn’t seem to realize is that she, in too many ways, is like her father. She spends much of the novel changing her
appearance, dying her hair, drawing on herself, getting pierced, eventually
getting tattooed. She views every relationship she has as how it affects her:
she can’t comprehend why Montana might have come away from college so
drastically changed. And her relationship with Bernardo has the appearance of
teenage love, because he gets her, but the relationship is superficial, and in
so many ways Bernardo is exactly like her father: emotionally needy, going
through relationships as if they are the be-all and end-all, never listening to
anyone (including his parents) unless they agree with him. Indeed, it says a
lot for how badly messed up Arizona is that Bernardo has everything she wants
from life: parents who have been married for years and still love each other,
siblings who support each other and who love Bernardo, stability in every way
that she doesn’t have it – and the fact that Bernardo considers this
suffocating and not restrictive. Even when Bernardo makes a decision that is so
purely that of a teenage boy, that when they deny they go out of their way to
list just how much they’ve supported him. Bernardo keeps talking about his last
girlfriend and how she broke his heart; you find yourself wondering if he’s
like Sean in that sense and that this is his own particular cycle.
Have I told
you too much? I’ve certainly told you far much more about the story of Making
Pretty than I usually do when it comes to these columns. And perhaps I have told you more than you
want to know. But I think in the case of this book, you may need to know less
about the plot then how the story is told. Because in this book’s case, how
much you end up enjoying may entirely depend on your interpretation of what
unfolds. Is this the tragedy of a family so messed up that there may be no hope
for Arizona and Montana by the end? Or is it a very dark comedy about a privileged
family who is going through the latest in a series of unfortunate events that
will no doubt be repeated again, no doubt with an even younger model? To quote
Michael Palin: “Perhaps both. Maybe neither.”
But the fact
is, there is a chance that Arizona has learned something from all of this. She
is, after all, a teenager and everything that happens when you’re a teenager
seems life-altering and apocalyptic under the best of circumstances. In the
last pages, she looks at an insight her sister has said that she might be a
sage or it might just sound insightful because of how drunk they are. The last
pages show she is beginning to see that there are things about everyone in her
life that are toxic but there are also things she wants to be part of who she
is anyway. In a symbolic gesture, she begins to remove some of the alterations
she’s done over the summer and decides that even the most permanent one doesn’t
have to mean what it did when she made it. Maybe she’ll leave New York and never
come back. Maybe she’ll come back at the end of the summer. Maybe her mother
will have the answers. Maybe she won’t. Maybe she’ll get back together with
Bernardo. Maybe she won’t. The fact that all of these things and none of them
are possible shows the possibility for change
that her father is long past showing.
As for that
quote. I’m pretty sure Arizona and Montana would agree with it. It’s the start
of a poem the reader should be able to find pretty quickly online, and that the
message in the last two lines is certainly one that they are trying to do in regard
with Sean, and probably one that may be the best thing considering everything
they’ve already lived through.
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